Sir, There is a tragicomical quality to the debate currently raging in successive Irish Times Property Supplements, over the relative merits of truly modern architecture versus what some call pastiche. It would require a fairly lengthy book to do justice to the cultural and historical psychological issues at stake in what might otherwise appear to be this more or less specialised debate but allow me to add a few words on what is going wrong with the built environment in Ireland overall and why.
Recent years have seen revolutionary (as opposed to evolutionary) changes to the Irish built environment, nearly all of them for the worse. The "pastiche" debate is itself merely a symptom of what must surely be an underlying national horror at the scale of the destruction. I suppose that the pastiche phenomenon is a last ditch attempt to shield the public from full awareness of what has been lost by contrast, the professional architects disdain for pastiche is a clever attempt to paper over the fact that architects have for the most part failed to fill in the emptiness of heritage lost with anything even approaching the aesthetically superior creations they pretend to espouse.
On all sides, what has been rejected, precipitously destroyed, and now (whether denied or not) certainly lamented at some deeper cultural level is the earlier cumulative effect of the small scale, symmetrical, subtle, human, plain and wonderfully attractive traditional vernacular. A blanket denigration of the past and blind worship of modernity shows up, as we know in other social sectors than the built environment, but it is in the urban, rural, and suburban landscapes and streetscapes that we are able to actually see the result of these complexes.
In Irish cities, we certainly see what a Dublin taxi driver quite accurately described to me as a "mish mash." The wholesale demolitions, the mad street widenings, and the mass "moving, out" of communities have all left behind spaces which have in turn been replaced by a confused and often incoherent set of buildings by people so eager to be "original" that they do not understand how to provide life enhancing architectural references to the tradition without being smothered in some absurdly imitative pastiche. This either or approach is a direct result of excessive demolition, and it is this quality of the "thread bare" city which sets contemporary Dublin apart from the frequently cited examples of Paris and Barcelona.
Similarly, in the Irish countryside, several older generations of houses, many of them stunningly beautiful and never at war with the landscape, are falling into disuse partly for lack of financial incentives for ordinary people to restore them, and often also without community self confidence to express a wish to reclaim the beauty of the past. Instead, we all know that the countryside has been foolishly suburbanised the once off hacienda, the towering ponderosa, the New Jersey split level the big Dallas style garage insult after insult to the context of fields and mountains, until many parts of Ireland are now unrecognisable from what they were a mere ten years ago.
While the debate on "pastiche versus great new architecture" proceeds apace with respect to the inner city, the outer "ring" of every major Irish town is sprawling out across a countryside territorially unable to absorb any more.
In my opinion, never were more beautifully forgiving fields and prospects, towns and streetscapes given to any people. Yet rarely have people so completely squandered a beautiful heritage or failed to add to it in an evolving, coherent, let alone visionary manner. Yours, etc Member, Dublin Planning Committee, An Taisce, Faculty of Law, UCD, Belfield, Dublin 4.